Quotes About Empathy

Normal people have an incredible lack of empathy. They have good emotional empathy, but they don't have much empathy for the autistic kid who is screaming at the baseball game because he can't stand the sensory overload. Or the autistic kid having a meltdown in the school cafeteria because there's too much stimulation.

Plays can create empathy. If you put a Muslim character on stage, and make him a full character, you're making it possible for the audience to feel empathy, and a little empathy on both sides would help.

I'm determined to disagree with people without being disagreeable. That's part of the empathy. Empathy doesn't just extend to cute little kids. You have to have empathy when you're talking to some guy who doesn't like black people.

Empathy is about standing in someone else's shoes, feeling with his or her heart, seeing with his or her eyes. Not only is empathy hard to outsource and automate, but it makes the world a better place.

Empathy is the faculty to resonate with the feelings of others. When we meet someone who is joyful, we smile. When we witness someone in pain, we suffer in resonance with his or her suffering.

I also grew to love Nancy Reagan in a certain way. I learned more - certainly I learned more bad stuff that I had known about in greater detail, but I also got a lot of empathy.

Leadership is about empathy.

I certainly know I have been blessed with much more empathy than I ever knew I would feel for other people.

It's a time when a lot of principle virtues are being tested. Do we still believe in the truth? Do we still believe in empathy? Do we still believe the protection of the weakest among us? These are yes or no questions, but the means of communication is all tied up with those virtues and you can't abandon those virtues as you pursue them.

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.

In the Communist period, the revolutionaries, the leaders were almost always - Che Guevara, people like that - they were always from the middle class and the educated. And empathy is a very powerful emotion.

I grew up with a lot of compassion and empathy. I notice when I meet other friends of mine that were raised Christian sometimes we have similar model of sensitivity, whether to our advantage or disadvantage.

The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy.

The only thing I can say in comparison is when I play comedy characters; I definitely put empathy in right up at the forefront. I think if you believe in someone because you not necessarily feel sorry for them, but you can see how they are the way they are and you can laugh with them, but rather than laugh at them, you are on their side and I think it's

Suppose you read about a pill that you could take once a day to reduce anxiety and increase your contentment. Would you take it? Suppose further that the pill has a great variety of side effects, all of them good: increased self-esteem, empathy, and trust; it even improves memory. Suppose, finally, that the pill is all natural and costs nothing. Now would you take it? The pill exists. It is meditation.

The Treatise of the Three Impostors is a book that enjoyed centuries of notorious nonexistence until (as Voltaire would say) it became necessary to invent it. Georges Minois writes with empathy, erudition, and a novelist's sense of buildup and timing, weaving in the parallel story of Europe's courageous freethinkers. In the face of today's social and even legal pressures against criticizing religion, it is good to see an honorable French tradition asserting itself.

Like works of literature, mathematical ideas help expand our circle of empathy, liberating us from the tyranny of a single, parochial point of view. Numbers, properly considered, make us better people.

The attempt to be an ideal parent, that is, to behave correctly toward the child, to raise her correctly, not to give to little ortoo much, is in essence an attempt to be the ideal child--well behaved and dutiful--of one's own parents. But as a result of these efforts the needs of the child go unnoticed. I cannot listen to my child with empathy if I am inwardly preoccupied with being a good mother; I cannot be open to what she is telling me.

Real spiritual journey in life is the discovery of self. I think once you take all the religious bullshit away from Jesus Christ, it's saying it's about this journey of discovering who you are, and what's really important in life is simply love. That the journey of civilization, the journey of understanding, is forgiveness, is empathy. And that's what humanity is striving for.

I have absolutely no empathy for camels. I didn't care for being abused in the Middle East by those horrible, horrible, horrible creatures. They don't like people. It's not at all like the relationship between horses and humans.

You want to teach all kids the skills that are on the better side of human nature: empathy, appreciating how one's behavior is affecting other people, resolving disagreements in ways that do not involve conflict, taking another's perspective, honesty.

Some people naturally have a sense of empathy and an understanding of how to bring their followers to do things. They become great politicians.

Successful hunting, it could be said, is an act of terminal empathy: the kill depends on how successfully a hunter inserts himself into the umwelt of his prey--even to the point of disguising himself as that animal and mimicking its behavior.

The collective psychology is something very close to being sacred - we can do it but we don't do it. We should understand that the Holocaust in the European conscience is reaching a point which is very close to what is sacred for people in the Southern countries, whether they are Muslims or not. Because of that we need to try to have intellectual empathy.

It is not learning we need at all. Individuals need learning but the culture needs something else, the pulse of light on the sea, the warm urge of huddling together to keep out the cold. We need empathy, we need the eyes that still can weep.

Well, one of the things we're supposed to be able to do as playwrights is write from a place of empathy, get into another character's shoes and experience things both mundane and tragic. And people don't - like me right now - people aren't necessarily the most eloquent when trying to express their emotions. I guess I feel as a playwright that those people deserve a voice, too, a voice that isn't so articulate that they themselves can no longer identify with it.

Jealousy knows neither morality nor empathy.

nothing is more important than empathy for another human being's suffering. Nothing. Not a career, not wealth, not intelligence, certainly not status. We have to feel for one another if we're going to survive with dignity.

Remember, empathy need not lead to sympathetically giving in to the other side’s demands—knowing how someone feels does not mean agreeing with them.

Look, I'm a cancer survivor, all right? So I have great personal empathy for people who have pre-existing conditions and can't get insurance.

If you are late for work in Mumbai and reach the station just as the train is leaving the platform, don't despair. You can run up to the packed compartments and find many hands unfolding like petals to pull you on board. And while you will probably have to hang on to the door frame with your fingertips, you are still grateful for the empathy of your fellow passengers, already packed tighter than cattle, their shirts drenched with sweat in the badly ventilated compartment. They know that your boss might yell at you or cut your pay if you miss this train.

When you are born without the ordinary feelings and emotions shared by most other human beings, life looks different to you. It seems at times like a movie you’re walking through, more a spectator than a participant. There is above all a lack of empathy with most of mankind, a sense of detachment. But with detachment comes perspective. The less you care, the more you know, and the more you know the less you care.

Films to the degree that they glorify mindlessness and short attention span they are bad, to the degree that they encourage empathy with people not like ourselves and encourage us to think about life, they are good.

I fear that we are beginning to design ourselves to suit digital models of us, and I worry about a leaching of empathy and humanity in that process.

Although emotionally delicate and eminently bruisable, teenagers are short on empathy. That comes later in life, if it comes at all.

Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman was one of those books I read in my mid-twenties that was life-changing. I think I had a very black-and-white view of Marie Antoinette before, but in reading that book, I developed a lot of empathy for her. She was just caught up in history. There was no place for a woman to do anything at that time anyway.

I hope to leave my children a sense of empathy and pity and a will to right social wrongs

History is the art of making an argument about the past by telling a story accountable to evidence. In the writing of history, a story without an argument fades into antiquarianism; an argument without a story risks pedantry. Writing history requires empathy, inquiry, and debate. It requires forswearing condescension, cant, and nostalgia. The past isn’t quaint. Much of it, in fact, is bleak.

Marriage is going to be that happy state in which we get all of the nurturance and care and love and empathy and even good advice that we didn't receive from our families.

Empathy allows us to re-perceive our world in a new way and move forward.

Were we incapable of empathy – of putting ourselves in the position of others and seeing that their suffering is like our own – then ethical reasoning would lead nowhere. If emotion without reason is blind, then reason without emotion is impotent.

Being kind doesn't mean being soft or a wuss. Kindness is not a sign of weakness. It is a sign of confidence. If you have developed a reputation for kindness and consideration, then even the most unpleasant decisions will go down easier because everyone will understand why you are doing what you are doing. They will realize that your decision must be necessary, and is not arbitrary or without empathy. As the old saying puts it, 'To the world, you may be one person, but to one person you may be the world.'

Some people who are recovering from depression want to use the lessons they're learned in coping with depression and their empathy for people with depression. Others want their career to have nothing to do with depression.

Who taught me that animals were put on this Earth for food? Who taught me to disrespect animals and view them as mere commodities? Who stole my compassion, my empathy and my conscience? Who lied to me? Who instilled this vicious mindset of human-to-animal exploitation as standard operating procedure?

Anyone who has experienced a certain amount of loss in their life has empathy for those who have experienced loss.

By peace we mean the capacity to transform conflicts with empathy, without violence, and creatively- a never-ending process

Human morality is unthinkable without empathy.

Although I'm not particularly troubled myself, I do have a lot of empathy for troubled characters.